Horses eased closer. No, not horses. Donkeys. Oh yeah, he remembered something that Ernie Hawes had called as Gable and Menasco had departed the El Rancho, something about looking out for the wild burros. Hawes had said to stay away from the burros because they want food and they bite. Now Gable had to smile because he had been worried about intruders, and these creatures cared nothing about Hollywood or movie stars crashing into mountains. Their lack of concern, or rather their focus on other matters, such as their empty bellies, allowed Gable to lift a few pounds of the load off his back and hand it to the beasts of burden wandering closer with a snort and a rustling of hooves.
There were eight wild burros in the pack, or whatever it was that burros traveled in, and they all minded their business but stole glances at the visitors to see if anybody was reaching into pockets and producing food. If they recognized Clark Gable, royalty in their presence, they gave no indication. In fact, their interest was transitory; they seemed to sense right away that these weren’t tourists, and they drifted off with barely a sound.
Gable had already forgotten about them. He stared up at the goddamn mountain, the one that had pounded him down and wouldn’t let him up. Gable said to Menasco, “What do you think happened up there?”
The question startled Al, who couldn’t escape the importance of it. They were, after all, this small band of people at the El Rancho Vegas, standing on a world stage, and it was better if nobody glanced down at the footlights or at the vast, faceless audience out there watching. Menasco gave a shrug of his shoulders and said that the plane had flown up there and crashed, and word was that nobody had seen it coming and nobody had suffered.
Gable stared a long time at the mountain, long past the moment when Al realized that the marrow of his bones had frozen. But that was all right, because Gable needed to be doing something besides smoke and drink, and right this minute he wasn’t doing either as he stared at the mountain. He just stood there, and he might as well have been on another continent for how far off he was. The sun was lower in the sky when Gable turned back to the car and got in, closed the passenger door, and sat there. It was over. Al Menasco opened the driver’s-side door and slid in, started the car, switched on the heater, and headed back toward Las Vegas. He couldn’t think of a single thing to say, so he didn’t say anything at all, and they drove the 25 minutes back to the El Rancho in perfect silence.
38. All in a Day’s Work
As Gable cast his far-off gaze at the mountain, Lt. Hunt still commanded his team at the crash site, and he looked down at two sets of female remains, or at least at remains that his team reasoned were female. This was Hunt’s second day on the mountain, and he was so tired. Exhausted from the climbing and the altitude and far more bone weary from the pressures of doing everything just right for his commanders, military and otherwise.
Hunt got word this Monday morning that dental records had confirmed the body found with Carole Lombard and brought down the mountain with her yesterday was not that of Elizabeth Peters, the second most important VIP to find and identify on the mountain. It was, by process of elimination, that of Mrs. Lois Hamilton, a young bride who, it was said, had been on the plane because she was traveling to visit her husband, a first lieutenant in the Army Air Corps. Dental records had confirmed her identity.
Lt. Hunt looked down at the two females before him in the snow just as a man wrenched his way through and past the clot of rescuers. He was an Army Air Corps officer, a first lieutenant, dark haired, his nose and cheeks flushed with cold.
Robert Burnett had begged, borrowed, and stolen to get here. He had cajoled his way from Falcon Field in Mesa to McCarran, and he had trudged every inch with the rescue party up the mountain to find his fiancée, Alice Frances Getz of Kewanee, Illinois, and now here he stood. He gasped for breath and looked down at the butchered body lying there in the snow and scorched earth. It was almost as if he beheld a miniature of her, shrunken there before him. She had been larger than life, that glorious personality and a warmth that had charmed men from coast to coast, and now here she lay, clenched in death, what was left of her arms frozen defensively in front of her, as if braced for impact. For an instant Lt. Burnett prayed that maybe this wasn’t Alice lying there in a lump, but he knew it was. He looked down upon her features, grotesque in death, but her features all the same. He wiped his eyes clear and there, on the breast of the blackened corpse, he saw the wings of a TWA air hostess that had been seared into flesh when her uniform had become one with her body in the funeral pyre.
As Burnett stood above her, the others reared back a little as if to say, Who is this guy? They held their places in a tableau for a long moment. Then Robert crumpled, down to his knees, and then he fell onto his butt and sat there beside the body. His eyes raked across the trees, the snow and the rocks, and the desert valley. His reeling mind whipped him backward just a few days when they had been together. The moment pounded his head like a wave at high tide: What was the worst that could happen?
The other Army fellows watched the new guy wipe his nose on his sleeve as he bawled his eyes out. It became clear to them slowly in ones and twos: This fellow knew this girl. Then: This fellow loved this girl. They did their best to shut themselves off from him, and pretend he wasn’t there, to give him his moment.
Lt. Hunt didn’t have time to watch a fellow officer dismantled by grief. There was work to do. The search team knew with certainty who Alice Getz was, and they had figured out Mrs. Hamilton. That left the charred remains of Elizabeth Peters, Lombard’s mother, as the final female on the flight and therefore the body lying forlornly at Hunt’s feet. Imagine living a whole lifetime, growing up, marrying, raising a famous daughter, probably being in high society, then getting on a plane, and ending up...here. So that was the score, all the female bodies lying before the group of rescuers. Process of elimination of male bodies on the mountain had yielded the identity of the only man who had not worn a uniform of some sort, either Army or TWA, on the evening of January 16. Hunt glanced down at his clipboard and introduced himself to Mr. Otto Winkler, press man from MGM and Carole Lombard’s companion on the doomed airliner.
The body of the civilian male, burned to a crisp, with only stumps of arms and legs, lay right in front of the Army lieutenant. Peters and Winkler were the most important bodies to be moved today and as soon as possible, although Lt. Hunt was mindful of the grieving brother officer sitting there in the snow.
Hunt stepped gingerly away from the other man, wiped his nose on the back of his gloved hand, and ordered the bodies to be bound in blankets for the trip up the cliffs to waiting horses. As he saw them hoisted, Hunt found it an immense relief to be able to cipher things out this far, to have the key bodies identified, and he felt pity for the others, the pilot and co-pilot and hostess and the Army boys who had been drawn and quartered in the crash. They didn’t have a powerful studio in Hollywood or generals in Washington looking out for them. They were just…casualties.
Finally, the bodies had been conveyed up on ropes and were out of sight, and Hunt felt physical relief that he was done with them. Things moved fast now—or, if not fast, at least they moved. His men had figured out that two of the bodies at the base of the cliff were the pilot and co-pilot. Scrutiny of charred sinew had revealed remnants of TWA uniform in both cases. Hunt didn’t know which was which, but at least he knew he had accounted for the entire three-person flight crew.
The sun was low in the sky and it would be dark soon, but at least Peters and Winkler would be on their way to Garrison’s for identification and inquests. All his men had felt the burden of official pressure from both coasts and keenly wanted to be done with the grisly task of scooping up frozen bits of human and lugging them about like groceries. Now that the Hollywood people had been attended to, he could see to ending this mountaintop drama, with only one significant problem: Through various means he could identify 19 bodies, or parts of 19, and there were just miscellaneous pieces of 3 others; the pieces were Army personnel, a
nd these pieces might never be positively identified. He knew he couldn’t promise anything to Maj. Anderson other than accounting for a representative part from each of the 22 people aboard Flight 3. And he really couldn’t even do that with any certainty.
Hunt was long past counting the minutes and hours on the mountain. This was a hell of a way to make a living, securing the scene of an air disaster, but as the sun sank and the air began to bite into his skin, Hunt heard an ungodly sound echoing up from the deeper ravine. He stopped and listened. It was the shriek of a banshee, blood-curdling screams, and not too far off. In a moment one of his men ran up holding a walkie-talkie.
The voice projected through the walkie was panicked: “The pack animal with the bodies has taken a fall! I don’t know what to do!” Hunt shuffled through the snow and took control of the unwieldy talking box. He asked for a summary of the situation.
The G.I. at the other end of the line babbled; the horse’s name was Cotton, and he had taken a wrong step in deep snow and gone down the precipice. Two bodies were aboard. The important bodies. The horse had slammed into a rock, broken a leg, and was wedged between that rock and a tree. Something needed to be done, now! Hunt didn’t even know if he had authority to order the animal destroyed, but the distant screams stabbed right into and through him.
“Shoot the horse!” he said into the walkie-talkie. “Repeat, destroy the animal!”
In a short moment he heard the report of a .45, then a second, and all again grew quiet. He knew he needed to get up there, and he asked for the location. As he stumbled across steep mountainside, he knew he was in trouble now. It was the very definition of snafu. The bodies of Peters and Winkler had crashed. Again. They now lay off the trail, no horse to get them out; they were still, after 72 hours, trapped on the mountain. And there wasn’t anything that Clark Gable or Maj. Anderson or the President of the United States could do about it with winter’s darkness closing in fast.
Hunt fought the urge to feel sorry for himself. It sure wasn’t easy being an officer. He knew he would be in for it the instant he had been ordered onto this job, and he knew it again now. The bodies of Peters and Winkler were far beyond caring about grievous damage done by a fall down a mountain and being rolled over by a thousand pounds of thrashing beast. They had already been slammed into a cliff at 180 miles per hour. This was just one more complicating factor in an already problematic exercise in forensics. Finally, Hunt found his men and the carcass of the unlucky horse and ordered that camp be built on the very spot so they could start the process again at first light.
Later there would be international headlines: New Tragedy on Mountain: Horse Killed as Bodies Fall off Cliff. But for Lt. William Hunt, it was all in a day’s work of victim recovery on Potosi Mountain.
39. The Little Boy Was Gone
A special Union Pacific train car had been ordered by MGM for the return of the grieving king and dead queen from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, a car that would offer Clark Gable complete privacy as he traveled back home with the coffins of his wife and mother-in-law. By now, after dusk on Monday the 19th, he was sleepwalking. In the past 24 hours he had returned to something resembling the Gable that people knew. He had showered, multiple times in fact, shaved, and dressed in a new suit and shirt that had been brought in for him, and was ready for the trip home. But Mannix was worried and so was Strickling. The man was aging before their eyes and appeared a decade older than the wide-eyed movie star they had surprised at Encino the previous Friday. His skin was hanging and his face ashen, the result of three days of anguish, and chain-smoking and drinking, with precious little food consumed.
Gable was prepared to leave the El Rancho. In fact, he had checked out before he even checked in, but Clark had already made it clear to anyone who would listen that he couldn’t return to the ranch. They had seen Gable lots of ways—happy, jovial, bemused, angry, offended, cold, prickly, and gruff. They had never seen him old, this barrel-chested man’s man. And they had never seen him skittish. For the first time the veneer was gone and the swagger and smirk with it. It was as if somebody had yanked the script off his lap, and he didn’t know his lines or the character he was supposed to play. In place of Clark Gable, King of Hollywood, an awkward, shy, middle-aged man sat before them, gray of face and dead in the eyes.
“I can’t go back to that lonely house,” he said over and over.
The entire MGM and Gable party at the El Rancho were ready to pull up stakes. They all awaited a mere formality, for the bodies of Petey and Otto to be trucked in to Garrison’s, formally identified, and released after the inquest. In fact, it was dark now, and where were the bodies? Shouldn’t some word have come by now? Gable would be driven up to Garrison’s to climb in the hearse with Carole’s body. Mannix would go with Petey in another hearse, and Wheelwright would accompany his friend Otto and widow Jill in a third. They would be driven to the train station under cover of darkness and moved into the private car. Mannix, Strickling, and Wheelwright would ride the train with McElwaine and Tootie, while Freddy, Spencer Tracy, and the many friends who had migrated to Las Vegas drove back home. A double service for Carole and her mother would take place on Wednesday at Forest Lawn, and admittance would be by engraved invitation only. MGM would oversee everything on behalf of its star, its king, from the printing of the invitations to development of a list of invitees with the help of Jean Garceau and delivery of their invitations by special messenger.
Finally, the phone rang as expected. Strickling picked up the receiver as Mannix rose to head out to his waiting car for the trip to the courthouse and the Peters-Winkler inquests. As Strickling listened on the phone, he put a hand out to Mannix: Halt. By the time he hung up the phone, Howard’s face was as gray as Gable’s.
He could barely choke out the words. The important bodies had not been brought down. There had been an accident; they were being brought out by horse and the animal had fallen off some cliff or other, and it had been too close to dark so the Army had kept the bodies up there. Strickling ordered Wheelwright to get on the phone at once: train station in Las Vegas, train station in California, Forest Lawn Memorial Park.
Gable’s reaction was predictable; he was mute, just nodded to himself, and sat and stared at nothing. At memories. At ghosts. At something no one else in the room could see.
As Strickling would try to sum up later, “The boyishness he had, you know. The little boy was gone.”
The men came to grips with the fact that the siege had not ended and would drag on. Mannix ordered food to be brought in, again, and each man made a call home to alert his wife of this new delay. Moments like this brought it home to Gable anew: He didn’t have a wife to alert anymore. It had taken this catastrophe to make him understand what he once had, and what he now didn’t. He saw a familiar piece of paper beside the overflowing ashtray on the coffee table in front of him. He picked up the paper. It was a telegram from the president of the United States. He read the words for about the twentieth time:
“Mrs. Roosevelt and I are deeply distressed. Carole was our friend, our guest in happier times. She brought great joy to all who knew her and to the millions who knew her only as a great artist. She gave unselfishly of her time and talent to serve her government in peace and war. She loved her country. She is and always will be a star, one we shall never forget nor cease to be grateful to. Deepest sympathy, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.”
Hadn’t he and Ma just been at the White House, at the Capitol, the Washington Monument, and Mount Vernon? Ma had been bouncing off every wall, thrilled as a kid, her enthusiasm downright contagious, and she kept saying in that fevered pitch of hers how they had talked to the President and First Lady “pretty as you please.” How intensely Ma had sat and listened to Roosevelt’s speech about the threat of the Axis powers. It was just a moment ago; he could almost reach out and touch those conversations. Could almost reach out and touch her. It was as if the echo of her voice bounced off the walls of the El Rancho.
She really
was something, Ma was. He knew that. He did. He loved having Carole Lombard on his arm because she was a fabulous-looking dame. What would the kids call her, a pipperoo? But much more than that, he gloried in having Carole Lombard on his arm because she believed she belonged there. As if she had been born to it, like royalty was born to it. When they were in the spotlight together, she was never the clown, but rather she let the lights and flashbulbs and attention wash over her and her chin would go up just a little and her smile would be serene and there was a knowing set to her face that said, “Yes, he is the king but don’t forget that I am the queen.” It was funny how she ran that motor mouth except at public occasions when she would clam up and the image would take over. At those times she understood that less was more. She kept people guessing and became mysterious. She really was something.
How could he ever set foot in the ranch again without her? The ranch where they had fought their last fight. The ranch where they had not said good-bye. He was a lost soul and his friends and handlers knew it. Word got out to reporters, and soon the whole world knew via the newspapers that Gable had “turned from a swashbuckling, carefree prankster into a depressed, grief-stricken recluse by the tragic death of Carole Lombard.”
40. Flying with Full Acceptance
On Tuesday morning, Lt. Hunt finally took the last of the bodies off the mountain and led his exhausted, half-frozen 21-man detail back to barracks. After they had gone, the CAB and TWA men remained. TWA’s Waldon Golien knew that with Hunt’s group gone, the official recovery of bodies and other evidence had ended. As he would later report: “After the last man of this detail left the scene of the accident, I made a final inspection that covered the area as thoroughly as I thought possible at the time. During that last inspection I found a number of additional pieces of mail. I also found parts of bodies that had not been uncovered by the searching party. I placed all material found in sacks that I carried with me.”
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